4 ms·

If the older game did not employ any kind of encryption of the data stream, isn't it open season to reverse engineer? So many of these are shut down by trademar

If the older game did not employ any kind of encryption of the data stream, isn't it open season to reverse engineer? So many of these are shut down by trademark licensing and artwork copyrights?

JonnyNova 9y ago
This happened with Star Wars Galaxies. Two projects: https://www.swgemu.com/ https://www.swgemu.com/ https://www.projectswg.com/ https://www.projectswg.com/
- djsumdog 9y ago
  And bnetd for an open BattleNet server: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd
  - katastic 9y ago
    Except they were sued, and Blizzard won.
nitwit005 9y ago
The networking side is doable, but there is usually no way to reverse engineer things like monster AIs that ran server side.
- imtringued 9y ago
  Some games have thousands of items/buffs/abilities. If the data for these is not included in the client (it sometimes is, usually for item descriptions) then it's basically impossible. The same applies to the damage algorithm. You cannot replicate the original game without the server code. You're basically building your own custom game that merely happens to share the same UI if you proceed to reverse engineer the server.